Raine Borg has an amazing web site about locks and keys through history. And it so happens that he's made reconstruction drawings of how keys identical to the one me and Per Vikstrand found in Torstuna recently were used. It's not a padlock key: it's most likely for a lock mounted permanently inside the lid of a chest or a door.
Lena Thunmark-Nylén's Die Wikingerzeit Gotlands informs me that the key type dates from the 11th and 12th centuries. Thus, alas, a bit too late to tell us much about pagan activities in the Field of Thor.
Thanks to Raine for permission to reproduce his drawings and to Tobias B. for tipping me off.
[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, medieval, middleages, locks; arkeologi, lås, medeltiden.]
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Certain place names over most of agricultural Scandinavia suggest that sacred fields were once prominent features of the landscape there. This was in the 1st Millennium AD, the period I work with. We have places named Field of Thor, Field of Freyr, Field of Frigga, or just Field, and all tend to…
In the mid-to-late 19th century, just as Scandy (and thus, it's fair to say, world) archaeology was making its first big breakthroughs, a lot of furnished 11th century female burials unexpectedly turned up in the churchyards of Gotland. The chain of events that led to this windfall of new data is…
I'm on a guest blogger roll. Here's something about 11th and 12th century metalworking finds from Sigtuna near Stockholm by my friendly colleague Anders Söderberg. He and our mutual friend Ny Björn Gustafsson are making sense of stuff that usually ends up with burnt daub in large anonymous sacks…
A long-time friend of my parents wrote me a letter recently, telling me that she'd found something unusual in her late mother's jewellery box. Today I visited her and had a look.
It's a small cast copper-alloy crucifix, darkly patinated, with a semi-obliterated image of the crucified Christ…
I don't quite get it: the key is supposed to pull back the bit of (bifurcated?) spring steel so that it's possible to slide the bolt out? But the slot that the key fits into doesn't seem to the key to go anywhere near the spring...
Nonsense! It's a kind of heretical Ankh. Turn it so the loop is on top and hang it vertically and it's a representation of the head and torso of a bodybuilder flexing her arms. Clearly it was an amulet owned by someone who was devoted to the goddess of tough love.
(if you believe this I got a bridge in Brooklyn I'm trying to unload real cheap...).
Michael, the keyhole is actually T-shaped, though the central pillar of the T is obscured by the bolt-and-spring.
Hallo Raine,
ich hoffe du bist der Raine aus Jönköping/Taberg.
vielleicht erinnerst du dich an Bärbelchen aus Deutschland.
Wie geht es dir?
Melde dich doch mal wenn du Zeit und Lust hast.
Viele liebe grüÃe aus Friedberg
Bärbelchen